Thursday, January 17, 2013

It’s probably appropriate that this short series on the
mysterious death of reason started off with a brief discussion of a mystery
novel, The Daughter of Time, by “Josephine
Tey.”We had re-read the book on a
recent weekend simply because we were hunting for something in our library that
wouldn’t take too much thought, and it fell off the shelf at our feet.

Anyway, within 48 hours of reading about how, if people
would just think, they’d realize that Richard III couldn’t possibly have done
it (at least according to the fictional Inspector Grant of the even more
fictional Not New Scotland Yard), the homily at mass on New Year’s Day raised a
similar issue.When talking to the
priest afterwards, he made the same comment: that people have forgotten (or
never learned) how to reason.(Coincidentally, this was in the Cathedral of Saint Thomas More, cf. yesterday’s
posting.)

But wait!Not only is
there More, there’s more!(Hey.He started it.When Sir Thomas resigned his office under
Henry VIII, he said, “The Lord Chancellor is no More.”)

A few days later we received a copy of Venerable Fulton J.
Sheen’s first published book, God and
Intelligence (1925), which includes an introduction by G. K. Chesterton —
yes, that G. K. Chesterton.

You’re probably ’way ahead of me by now, but can you guess
what one of Sheen’s main points in the book is (echoed by Chesterton in his
intro)?Yup.You got it.People have forgotten how to use reason.They tend to substitute faith in whatever they decided they want to
believe for what Pope Pius XII called the force of natural reason.

So we did a quick re-read of Chesterton’s 1933 biographical
sketch of Saint Thomas Aquinas (“The Original Deep Fat Friar”) . . . and
realized that he made many of the same points in The Dumb Ox that he and Sheen had raised eight years earlier in God and Intelligence.Chesterton even made some of the same
arguments and named some of the same names.

We probably can’t prove anything.We’ll leave that to fictional detectives who
work for a Scotland Yard that never existed.We can, however, have a sneaking suspicion that Sheen’s work may have
inspired Chesterton to have a go at correcting or countering what Pius XII
would identify as the greatest danger to Catholic doctrine in the world.This is the misuse and redefinition of the
natural law, and the descent into pure moral relativism, the basis for
political totalitarianism.

Pius XII did this in Humani
Generis in 1950 . . . the same year The
Daughter of Time was published.(Coincidence?We think not.)

A short time after New Year’s, we had lunch with a professor
of medieval philosophy.Guess what one
of the topics was.That’s right, the
inability of people to use reason.

Soon after that, we got a question about a book by John
Mueller, Redeeming Economics, and posted
some thoughts about the argument as described by the questioner and on the
publisher’s website.As there seemed to
be a couple of logical flaws in the book’s argument as described — and because
the book costs nearly $30 — we decided not to read it, but assume that the item
performs as advertised.

Given the book’s description, it would (to quote Dorothy
Parker) not be tossed aside lightly, but thrown with great force.There was no compelling reason to read it,
much less spend actual cash money on the thing.Why, after all, would you purchase a product that, if accurately
described, you neither want nor need?

The specific question was whether we had ever reviewed
Mueller’s book.We answered, “no,” and
gave our reasons why we didn’t feel compelled to do so. This seemed reasonable to us.Someone asks you whether you’ve tried Yuck
Foods new chocolate bacon sheep dip.You
respond that you’re allergic to chocolate, have problems with cholesterol,
don’t care for Yuck Foods’ products, and the combination sounds, uh, “bad,” or
at least less than tasty.

That should be enough for most people . . . but not this
bunch.A few more joined in (the posting
that mentioned the reasons for not wanting to review Mueller’s book is rapidly
becoming our most, uh, “popular” posting), asserting that the reasons for not
wanting to review Mueller’s book are, in reality, a review of Mueller’s book,
and we should not make judgments of any kind until we have actually read
Mueller’s book . . . and then proceeded to make it even less inviting by
describing even more flaws in the thing.

Uh, huh.For one
thing, if you want us to review a book, the least you can do it provide us with
the book, not just make demands and start tasking us — or spending our money
for us.For another, we don’t have to
try murder, drug addiction, pornography, death by hanging, Star Trek V or four more years of wildly irresponsible government
spending to know we don’t want to.“You
didn’t give it a chance” is not a valid reason.There are some things to which you don’t give a chance.

Like being forced to review books that, assuming they are
accurately described, go directly counter to reason.